CHAPTER II

DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY

In the nature of the one God there are three eternal distinctions which are represented to us under the figure of persons, and these three are equal. This tripersonality of the Godhead is exclusively a truth of revelation. It is clearly, though not formally, made known in the New Testament, and intimations of it may be found in the Old.

The doctrine of the Trinity may be expressed in the six following statements: 1. In Scripture there are three who are recognized as God. 2. These three are so described in Scripture that we are compelled to conceive of them as distinct persons. 3. This tripersonality of the divine nature is not merely economic and temporal, but is immanent and eternal. 4. This tripersonality is not tritheism; for while there are three persons, there is but one essence. 5. The three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, are equal. 6. Inscrutable yet not self-contradictory, this doctrine furnishes the key to all other doctrines.—These statements we proceed now to prove and to elucidate.

Reason shows us the Unity of God; only revelation shows us the Trinity of God, thus filling out the indefinite outlines of this Unity and vivifying it. The term ‘Trinity’ is not found in Scripture, although the conception it expresses is Scriptural. The invention of the term is ascribed to Tertullian. The Montanists first defined the personality of the Spirit, and first formulated the doctrine of the Trinity. The term ‘Trinity’ is not a metaphysical one. It is only a designation of four facts: (1) the Father is God; (2) the Son is God; (3) the Spirit is God; (4) there is but one God.

Park: “The doctrine of the Trinity does not on the one hand assert that three persons are united in one person, or three beings in one being, or three Gods in one God (tritheism); nor on the other hand that God merely manifests himself in three different ways (modal trinity, or trinity of manifestations); but rather that there are three eternal distinctions in the substance of God.” Smyth, preface to Edwards, Observations on the Trinity: “The church doctrine of the Trinity affirms that there are in the Godhead three distinct hypostases or subsistences—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—each possessing one and the same divine nature, though in a different manner. The essential points are (1) the unity of essence; (2) the reality of immanent or ontological distinctions.” See Park on Edwards’s View of the Trinity, in Bib. Sac., April, 1881:333. Princeton Essays, 1:28—“There is one God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are this one God; there is such a distinction between Father, Son and Holy Spirit as to lay a sufficient ground for the reciprocal use of the personal pronouns.” Joseph Cook: “(1) The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are one God; (2) each has a peculiarity incommunicable to the others; (3) neither is God without the others; (4) each, with the others, is God.”

We regard the doctrine of the Trinity as implicitly held by the apostles and as involved in the New Testament declarations with regard to Father, Son and Holy Spirit, while we concede that the doctrine had not by the New Testament writers been formulated. They held it, as it were in solution; only time, reflection, and the shock of controversy and opposition, caused it to crystalize into definite and dogmatic form. Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism, 59, 60, claims that the Jewish origin of Christianity shows that the Jewish Messiah could not originally have been conceived of as divine. If Jesus had claimed this, he would not have been taken before Pilate,—the Jews would have dispatched him. The doctrine of the Trinity, says Chadwick, was not developed until the Council of Nice, 325. E. G. Robinson: “There was no doctrine of the Trinity in the Patristic period, as there was no doctrine of the Atonement before Anselm.” The Outlook, Notes and Queries, March 30, 1901—“The doctrine of the Trinity cannot be said to have taken final shape before the appearance of the so-called Athanasian Creed in the 8th or 9th century. The Nicene Creed, formulated in the 4th century, is termed by Dr. Schaff, from the orthodox point of view, ‘semi-trinitarian.’ The earliest time known at which Jesus was deified was, after the New Testament writers, in the letters of Ignatius, at the beginning of the second century.”

Gore, Incarnation, 179—“The doctrine of the Trinity is not so much heard, as overheard, in the statements of Scripture.” George P. Fisher quotes some able and pious friend of his as saying: “What meets us in the New Testament is the disjecta membra of the Trinity.” G. B. Foster: “The doctrine of the Trinity is the Christian attempt to make intelligible the personality of God without dependence upon the world.” Charles Kingsley said that, whether the doctrine of the Trinity is in the Bible or no, it ought to be there, because our spiritual nature cries out for it. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 1:250—“Though the doctrine of the Trinity is not discoverable by human reason, it is susceptible of a rational defense, when revealed.” On New England Trinitarianism, see New World, June, 1896:272–295—art. by Levi L. Paine. He says that the last phase of it is represented by Phillips Brooks, James M. Whiton and George A. Gordon. These hold to the essential divineness of humanity and preëminently of Christ, the unique representative of mankind, who was, in this sense, a true incarnation of Deity. See also, L. L. Paine, Evolution of Trinitarianism, 141, 287.

Neander declared that the Trinity is not a fundamental doctrine of Christianity. He was speaking however of the speculative, metaphysical form which the doctrine has assumed in theology. But he speaks very differently of the devotional and practical form in which the Scriptures present it, as in the baptismal formula and in the apostolic benediction. In regard to this he says: “We recognize therein the essential contents of Christianity summed up in brief.” Whiton, Gloria Patri, 10, 11, 55, 91, 92—“God transcendent, the Father, is revealed by God immanent, the Son. This one nature belongs equally to God, to Christ, and to mankind, and in this fact is grounded the immutableness of moral distinctions and the possibility of moral progress.… The immanent life of the universe is one with the transcendent Power: the filial stream is one with its paternal Fount. To Christ supremely belongs the name of Son, which includes all that life that is begotten of God. In Christ the before unconscious Sonship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. The Father is the Life transcendent, above all, the Son is Life immanent, through all; the Holy Spirit is the Life individualized, in all. In Christ we have collectivism; in the Holy Spirit we have Individualism; as Bunsen says: ‘The chief power in the world is personality.’ ”

For treatment of the whole doctrine, see Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:344–465; Twesten, Dogmatik, and translation in Bib. Sac., 3:502; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:145–199; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:57–135; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:203–229; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:248–333, and History of Doctrine, 1:246–385; Farrar, Science and Theology, 138; Schaff, Nicene Doctrine of the Holy Trinity, in Theol. Eclectic, 4:209. For the Unitarian view, see Norton, Statement of Reasons, and J. F. Clarke, Truths and Errors of Orthodoxy.